Dina Temple-Raston

Dina Temple-Raston is NPR's counter-terrorism correspondent and has been reporting from all over the world for the network's news magazines since 2007.

She recently completed a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University where she studied the intersection of Big Data and intelligence.

Prior to NPR, Temple-Raston was a longtime foreign correspondent for Bloomberg News in Asia and served as Bloomberg's White House correspondent during the Clinton Administration. She has written four books, including The Jihad Next Door: Rough Justice in the Age of Terror, about the Lackawanna Six terrorism case. She is a frequent contributor to the PBS Newshour, a regular reviewer of national security books for the Washington Post Book World, and also contributes to the New Yorker, WNYC's Radiolab, the TLS, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others.

She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, and she has an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Manhattanville College.

The terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday could be an early harbinger of a new, more professional kind of terrorist attack leveled against the West.

In the past, al-Qaida depended on violent jihadis showing up in Pakistan or Yemen with a passport or visa that would allow them to return to home. The group would train them and send them back. Counter-terrorism officials are concerned that ISIS has taken that a step further by sending battle-hardened fighters to do their dirty work.

Finding someone to spend your life with can be hard under any circumstances, but young observant Muslims will tell you that here in the U.S., it's doubly so. They have to navigate strict Islamic dating rules while interacting with the opposite gender in a Westernized world. Now, a handful of young Muslims think that a new app called Ishqr provides a partial solution.

Al-Qaida's arm in Syria, a group called Jabat al-Nusra, has just deployed a new weapon – a young British convert named Lucas Kinney.

Kinney, 26, is making videos for the group and he's no stranger to filmmaking. His father is Patrick Kinney, a well-known Hollywood assistant director who worked on such iconic films as Rambo, Braveheart, and the Indiana Jones series, among others.

The American Psychological Association voted Friday in favor of a resolution that would bar its members from participating in national security interrogations.

The resolution by the country's largest professional organization of psychologists passed overwhelmingly. The only dissenting vote came from Col. Larry James, a former Army intelligence psychologist at Guantanamo.

FBI Director James Comey told senators on Wednesday that increased encryption on mobile devices is complicating the FBI's job.

Comey, along with a roster of Obama administration officials, has been asking Silicon Valley companies for months for a solution that would allow law enforcement to monitor communications with a court order, while protecting the privacy of consumers. Technology companies like Apple and Google have resisted their entreaties, setting off a tense debate over encrypted data and a user's right to own their own information.

U.S. authorities have arrested a third New York man in connection with an alleged plot to detonate pressure cooker bombs in New York City for the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS.

The latest arrest involved a 21-year-old Staten Island man named Fareed Mumuni who allegedly tried to kill a law enforcement official who came to his house earlier today. The criminal complaint alleged that he repeatedly attempted "to stab an FBI Special Agent with a large kitchen knife."

More than two years after the self-proclaimed Islamic State burst on the scene, it is still difficult to quantify just how big the threat is in this country. Counterterrorism officials say nearly 200 Americans have traveled to Syria and Iraq, are thinking about doing so or have returned to the U.S. after spending time there.

NPR has learned that number of returnees in this country is nearly three dozen — but their cases remain sealed.

Last week in the United Arab Emirates, group of Muslim scholars held what they called a "haqqathon" – a hackathon meant to create new ways for Islamic scholars to connect with young Muslims and, by doing so, defuse violent extremists like the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

And al-Qaida is at the center of a pretty stunning announcement from the White House this morning. President Obama said two hostages of al-Qaida, including an American, were killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation.

Two women who were roommates in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been arrested in a homegrown terrorism plot. Separately, a man thought to be one of the highest-ranking Americans in al-Qaeda will face charges in the U.S.

An Illinois National Guardsman and his cousin were arrested for allegedly conspiring to provide support to the self-proclaimed Islamic State. One of the men wanted to go to Syria to martyr himself, and the other planned to carry out an attack on a nearby military base in northern Illinois.

CIA Director John Brennan told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York today that the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, is facing dissension in its ranks and is finding it hard to govern the territory it controls. These are the same problems terrorist groups that try to govern have faced in the past.

The director was cautiously optimistic that the group, which stormed across Syria and Iraq last summer and has held much of the territory it captured since then, is stumbling.

Among the sweeping changes France is proposing in the aftermath of this month's terrorist attacks in Paris are new measures to fight Islamic radicalization in its prisons. It is an enormous problem brought into starker relief because two of the suspects in the attacks earlier this month were products of the French penal system.

Shannon Maureen Conley was just 19, barely out of high school and a convert to Islam, when she fell in love with a Tunisian man who said he was an Islamic State fighter in Syria. And, according to a criminal complaint, she wanted to leave her Denver suburb and join him.

Over the course of five months, the FBI talked to Conley nine times, trying to persuade her not to go to Syria.

But it didn't work. According to a local news report, her father tipped off the FBI after he found her one-way ticket from Denver to Turkey.

One of the first targets of U.S. airstrikes in Syria was an al-Qaida unit that American officials call the Khorasan Group. Because few outside the intelligence community had ever heard of it, some critics have said Khorasan was created out of whole cloth to give the U.S. an excuse to bomb Syria.